dist: drop .deb

[clason]

Problem

Linux releases come in too many flavors: appimage, tar.gz archive, deb package. This is confusing and a waste of resources.

Expected behavior

Only provide a single release format: appimage, which is the "blessed" format that Just Works™️ but can also be extracted locally.

As tar.gz is used by many downstream projects for their CI, we should leave it for now but make clear that it's only provided for that purpose and that end users are strongly encouraged to use the appimage. Also push downstream to switch to appimages instead so we can remove that for 0.10.

Plan

1. Drop the .deb for the 0.9 release
2. Drop the .tar release for nightlies sometime during 0.10

This means that

• 0.9 will only release as .appimage and .tar
• 0.10 will release only as .appimage
• nightlies will drop .deb after 0.9, and .tar some time after that (with a longer announcement period).

[dundargoc]

I like @glacambre 's suggestion: rename the deb and tar files to nvim-linux64-deprecated.<extension> and give it x amounts of time before yeeting it.

[clason]

Well, even renaming will instantly break CI, so it's not really a deprecation. And if you manually need to change things, you might as well change them properly. This only encourages bandaid fixes and later complaints.

[glacambre]

if you manually need to change things, you might as well change them properly

You might not have time to change them properly the minute you discover something is breaking though. Renaming the tar is the quick and easy fix you do until you have the time to implement a proper solution.

[clason]

The idea would be to provide a snippet you can paste into your action in replacement of tar -zxf nvim-linux64.tar.gz... (And nobody should be using the .deb.)

To be clear, I'm talking here only of dropping the .deb, for now -- the tar.gz will stay at least until 0.10 to allow people to switch over. If there's extensive use of the .deb in downstream CI, I'd be interested in learning about that.

[clason]

Guess I was wrong: https://github.com/search?q=nvim-linux64.deb&type=code 😞

(For reference, tar.gz use is twice that: https://github.com/search?q=nvim-linux64.tar.gz&type=code)

[justinmk]

Example of .deb not interacting correctly with apt-installed Nvim: #22731

[clason]

Courtesy of @folke, here's how you can extract the appimage in GHA if you want to have nvim "installed" (i.e., on your $PATH):

      - name: Install Neovim
        shell: bash
        run: |
          mkdir -p /tmp/nvim
          wget -q https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/nightly/nvim.appimage -O /tmp/nvim/nvim.appimage
          cd /tmp/nvim
          chmod a+x ./nvim.appimage
          ./nvim.appimage --appimage-extract
          echo "/tmp/nvim/squashfs-root/usr/bin/" >> $GITHUB_PATH

[dundargoc]

Example of .deb not interacting correctly with apt-installed Nvim: #22731

Another one: #21261

[clason]

@dundargoc note to us: we should replace rhysd/action-setup-vim in our scripts (api-docs, lintcommit) with manually installing our own appimage. More robust, more control, and no point in requiring an external script for installing our own app.

[glacambre]

@clason

More robust

In my experience, rhysd/action-setup-vim has been much more robust than any other installation method thanks to its ability to fall back to building Neovim when a nightly/release build is not available (due to e.g. Github problems or build issues that existed when the neovim nightlies are built but were fixed during the day).

Can't argue about the other points though :).

[clason]

Since the .deb package has been removed, are we all supposed to use appimage instead?

Yes, that is exactly the idea. It's self-contained and runs on the widest possible selection of platforms (not tied to a specific distro).

I know it's a dumb question but still... I used to use this repo to get the latest neovim for debian because of its debian package.

But Debian packages are the Debian maintainers' job; the Neovim project is not in the business of maintaining distro packages. (The .deb was never deliberately added; it kinda snuck in as part of a packaging infrastructure improvement to show that it's possible.)

[folke]

A great alternative to using the appimage is to use bob instead. With bob it's very easy to always use the latest nightly and you can even use different Neovim versions next to each other.

[clason]

Resolution

The .tar.gz is now created as part of the appimage workflow (hence no longer a separate release), so it will continue to be supported. (Thanks, @dundargoc!)

The .deb will not come back, as distro-specific packaging formats are the responsibility of distribution maintainers.